Gatwick Airport hit by major IT outage

Holidaymakers left staring at whiteboards for flight information after system failure.

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A major IT failure at Gatwick Airport is causing misery for thousands of holidaymakers.

The fault, which is affecting the digital screens at the airport's departure lounge, has left staff resorting to manually writing out flight information such as departure gates on whiteboards.

A spokesperson for the airport told the BBC that the screens, which show departure information for flights leaving Gatwick, had stopped working earlier this morning.

"Due to an ongoing issue with Vodafone – a provider of IT services for Gatwick – flight information is not being displayed correctly on the airport's digital screens and is currently being displayed manually in the terminals," they added.

"Gatwick would like to apologise to any passengers affected and expects Vodafone to resolve the issue as soon as possible."

Gatwick IT problems

The airport said that although thousands of travelers have been affected by the outage, no flights have been directly delayed, and only "a handful of people" had missed flights.

The outage stems from a fault with the screens, which are provided and operated by Vodafone. It said that a damaged fibre cable was to blame, and that the incident was "a top priority".

This comes just over a year after a major computer outage caused hundreds of flights to be cancelled at both Heathrow and Gatwick.